ATI ships its first DX9 mobile workstation chip

ATI yesterday took the wraps off its first DirectX 9 mobile-oriented Workstation-class graphics accelerator package, the Mobility FireGL T2.

Based on the FireGL 9600 chip, the Mobility T2 provides four parallel pixel pipelines and two side-by-side geometry engines. But according to ATI, the accelerator can handle only six textures per rendering pass, compared to the desktop FireGL T2-128's 16. Anti-aliasing at 2x, 4x and 6x is provided, along with anisotropic filtering at up to 16x.

The Mobility chip adds ATI's existing power-saving technologies, PowerPlay and Power-on-Demand, which dynamically adjusts the chip's clock and core voltage according to load.

Both parts support 128MB of DDR SDRAM graphics memory across a 128-bit interface. Full 128-bit floating point precision is supported. The mobile accelerator can run two monitors at up to 2048 x 1536, digital and analog. It supports AGP 8x and 4x.

The Mobility T2 works with Windows 2000 and XP, and Linux, via OpenGL or DirectX 9. Both graphics APIs' high-level shading languages are supported. Drivers and chip have been certified by "leading" CAD and digital content creation apps, ATI said.

The Mobility FireGL T2 will be used in IBM's ThinkPad R50P and T41P machines, and is shipping now in HP's Compaq nw8000. ®